2006-06-14

Common Lisp and Web Development

Lately I have again seen some posts about the question "why don't people use Lisp for Web applications?" (for example, this one). Reading these got me thinking why, exactly, do I use Common Lisp for OINK. The obvious answer, in my case, is that OINK is merely thin veneer over Wilbur.

Obvious, yes, but in fact I realized that there is a more general truth beneath the answer: Without addressing the specific question whether Common Lisp is good for building the Web-specific parts of your application, we know it is good for all the other parts anyway. My point is that even if there were better languages/frameworks to do the "Web" part (hypothetically speaking, since I am not saying that there necessarily are), I am not willing to compromise the "non-Web" part by using some language that's less expressive than Common Lisp.

Posted by ora at 21:33

Comments

There's a pretty complex web-based Common Lisp application here for doing bioinformatics and knowledge representation -- not semantic web based, but in a similar spirit. It's not only Lisp based, it lets web-browser users write Lisp code that runs against the knowledge base. BioBike: